Doug did not remember the fall. He landed on his back. He never lost consciousness, but his wind got knocked thoroughly out. Water hit him, then surged over him like an icy cloak, fingering down his nostrils. For a moment he seemed to be surfacing, he could see the sky and stone, but his feet hit something solid and it leveraged him and his backpack down into the clear water with no air in his lungs and adrenalin bursting in his veins. When he rolled to one side, his now-wet backpack had doubled its weight. Panic began to set in, but he fought not to breathe water. He twisted around, his hands and legs smacked on the rock bottom, but his feet were above his head. He suddenly thought to pull his feet under him, then thrust up.

Standing with water just a bit above his knees, Doug gasped and choked, sucking air in now, gagging on the water he’d swallowed and gotten in his lungs. There was two feet of water at the pool’s deepest end, abutting the boulder Doug had taken the nose dive from. Doug stared upward from where he had fallen as he undid the waist belt on his pack.

“You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” he proclaimed out loud, practically gargling. “You got no right to be alive.”

It couldn’t have been less than a fifteen foot drop, he calculated. He pulled the quick release on his pack and slid it off his shoulders.

It suddenly dawned on him. He was standing in a pool of water, twenty feet wide, fifteen feet long, two feet deep, in mid-July in the desert. It also dawned on him it was damn cold. Before he had taken stock and checked himself, he grabbed up his hat, struggled to his feet, grabbed the handle on his pack and started staggering up the boulder the water pooled upon. He looked down at the crystal clear water. There appeared to be nothing in the water but some leaves and thorny pods floating on the bottom . His path was across some kind of moss or lichen growing three feet down the slanting rock from the water line. He absently noted that the pool could get much deeper and bigger. The black moss covered the boulder shore he walked up.

He took one step on to the lichen and his boot slipped off, sending him down on his knee that ground through the moss into the stone. He slid back down into the now uncomfortably cold water. Blood seeped through the stain of the black moss on his wounded knee. He cursed.

“Fall twenty feet without a scratch, then tear myself up like this.”

Doug paused where he sat, his teeth chattering softly. His first impression was he was in a tank, all around him were rock walls, and he had a moment of claustrophobia . Behind him the rock plugged the water up. To the south, a stone mountain rose high enough that the sun barely crested it. There were pines and junipers hanging from precarious perches in the stone. Three Pinyons lined up along the western wall of rock, and two cottonwood trees were due south, although he couldn’t quite make out if they were inside the hole he was in. Water trickled down a small waterfall into his present location. There was a row of plants growing along the crest of where the waterfall trickled. It made Doug think of a row of tulips in Holland. Single individual plants, some of them with white trumpet-shaped flowers. Datura.

Two things broke Doug’s musings, the brutal cold seeping into his very bones, and a God-awful taste in his mouth and throat. Coppery metallic tang, it also had an oily fuzzy texture that defied anything he’d ever imagined. He stood up. The sun and arid desert air did not help immediately, but in a moment, he could feel his hair drying and getting hot even as his feet froze, his Gortex boots defeated with water pouring in from the top.

He had to get out of the water. He looked around him. Two sides, the north and west of the pool, were simply sheer white boulders rising up fifteen, twenty feet. The beach boulder with slippery lichen, eastern end, was ten feet long once out of the water. Past that, another wall of stone fifteen feet tall The south side was mostly stone making a wall and the waterfall, that after a moment of inspection, Doug wondered if it was not stacked stone. He inspected the water he stood in again, the terrible taste in his mouth not abating. No plants, no bugs, pupfish or crawdaddies, no little spiders skittering across the surface. Life in desert water was a given. That thought made Doug realize another concern. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth, then grimaced. He’d had ghiardia once before, cramping muscles, aching joints, shits and vomiting. It had only taken a couple days for the parasite to tear him up, and he’d been sick for a week.

Nothing to be done about it. He still needed to get out of the pool. He sloshed south toward the waterfall.

Instead of the single stone for a smooth slippery floor, like most of the pool, this end had a rubble base of smaller stone, that he gingerly stepped on and worked east. This rubble too was slippery with the black moss, but he could stick his heel or toe into a spot and stay put. He threw his hat up on the rock shore, then lunged his waterlogged backpack after it. Three steps, and he was on solid ground.

He had to get some clean water in his mouth to wash out the awful taste that seemed to be intensifying. He sat down and got his boots off. How long could it take to get dry, he wondered. He sat now on his new perch of stone, at least four or five feet higher than he’d been, water draining off him and across the rock. And he was cold. The sun beating down, the stone all around him reflecting all the intensity of the desert, and he was cold, and except for sitting in the sun, he couldn’t imagine what else he could do.

Clean water. The taste in his mouth was curdling his gut. He pulled his canteen around, twisted its top and drank a long gulping draw. He pulled it back and grimaced. No help. No help at all. He gasped with the discomfort of the taste. He filled his mouth with the water from his canteen, then spat it out. No joy. The awful taste wouldn’t subside.

So many chores, he thought, as he stared at his bleeding knee, something else that needed tending. He tried to flip his water-soaked backpack over as he was in the habit of doing, and nearly jerked his fingers out of their sockets. He took both hands and rolled it over, finally getting at the first aid kit.

What could the taste be from, what could it be?

He looked down into the pool, the water draining off him and the backpack evaporating before it got off the rock. Nothing growing or living in the water except for this lichen, this moss along the surface edges.

What if the water was poisoned?

Doug’s heart, which had nearly gotten back to normal, started racing again. What were the poisons found commonly in desert watering holes? Arsenic. What else? Cyanide? He couldn’t be sure. A mouthful of arsenic he might survive, but didn’t any amount of cyanide kill you?

He was distracted yet again from his musings. He looked down at his bloody knee, the moss a dark stain on his flesh with blood oozing through, and, it was the damnedest thing, he could taste the black lichen. Taste it. Not in his mouth, but on his knee, as if the scraped-open flesh had exposed taste buds under the skin. The moss, lichen, whatever, had something of a mushroom flavor, with a gritty greasy texture, clean fine sand in oil, olive oil. He stared at his knee and licked his lips. Extra virgin. Damnedest thing. How could that possibly be?

Focus, he told himself. He looked back at the water, started to look up to where he’d fallen, froze half-way up, then bellowed as he leapt back.

Working with the natural crevices of the boulder that he’d fallen off of, across the entire length of the stone, someone had carved a giant eye.

Doug’s heart doubled its pounding as he gaped at the eye staring back at him. His mind raced. He’d never seen anything but Yonis carved into stone. If this was a Yoni, it was of an old woman with a yeast infection. The pupil of the eye was a three-quarter circle off the upper eye lid. Engraved lines undulated as they radiated away from the eye. Doug felt ambushed. It had been there all along and he hadn’t seen it, yet it dominated the bowl he found himself in. It ruled.

Doug sat there for what seemed a very long time, waiting for something to happen, for the next omen to crowd in.

Nothing. It was amazingly quiet. The bad taste in his mouth and throat settled in his stomach and made him queasy, but he didn’t vomit. He kept tasting the black smear on his knee. The eye didn’t blink. The water drained and evaporated from his clothes and hair. He slapped his saturated boonie hat on his head and it felt good. He went from chattering teeth to comfortably warm, getting to hot, and he sought shelter now from the direct rays of the sun. He climbed south, where the boulder mountain cast a shadow over the upper end of the bowl he’d fallen into.

Again he was in awe. The stones that marked the upper half of the bowl, had been indeed stacked, three feet up from the center of the V-shaped dam. The upper tier turned from stone shores to a dark loamy soil in the center, a veritable marsh of green reeds, fat piles of moss. He could hear frogs croaking now, to the south west. The soft wet ground and occasional pools of water were so thick it was a barrier, separating the east side of the bowl here from the west. The boulders here too looked formidable, unassailable.

How am I going to get out of here, he thought. He set that consideration aside. There was always a way out. Or up, or over.

Doug looked back at the row of Datura growing along the stone wall that held this marsh up here. They were old plants, gnarled limbs growing over the sides of the dam. The water didn’t wash over the wall, but seeped through the dirt, through the stone partition, to finally gather and fall into the lifeless bowl below.

His stomach cramped. He staggered back and gasped with new pain. Doug sat down on a rounded boulder out of the swamp. He looked back at the eye. Even from this second higher tier, it dominated the bowl.

How could he have forgotten he suspected he was poisoned? Doug gasped with the fear all over again. Suddenly there seemed to be so many chores to do.

Cyanide is a quick poison, isn’t it, he asked himself. Convulsion, coma, death. He scooped up his canteen and took a long slug. What else could he do? He’d heard of people sticking their fingers down their throat to vomit, but he’d never done it. And now it was surely too late. How long had he been in the bowl? He couldn’t even guess. Why didn’t he know?

He looked around him, looking for something, some clue, some way out.

Across the marsh, on the western side, several cactii grew among stones, and it looked, for all the world, like a potted cactus garden.

Doug rose and felt as if something of him was a quarter further on and a quarter left behind. He paused a moment and waited for himself to catch up and come back. It took a moment. He felt like a tuning fork. There was even a hum. Then he began walking deliberately south, taking high steps to avoid tripping. He watched his knees rise up toward him, watched them descend, the one knee bloody, bruised and stained. It crossed his mind. Why hadn’t he thought to wash the black stuff away? It needed cleaning. Wasn’t he going to do that? What happened? So many chores, so much to do. He should have taken care of his knee before he started his trek, but now he felt committed to investigating the western side of the little marsh.

Doug looked up and gasped as he took a step back. He’d nearly run into the far southern end of his bowl, right into a set of wind-shaped boulders. Practically in front of him, a little to the left, were four tar-black dots, pointing at a hole in the stones, an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. Doug lowered himself to his knees and peered in. It started climbing up into the rocks, running deeper into the rock mountain. The floor of this cave was curious, odd. Doug reached out and scooped at what he first imagined was white sand, and there was that, but also, mixed into the sand, was a substantial amount of salt.

“Salt,” Sam had intoned as they stood over an encrusted fish trap on the ancient shore of Lake Cahuilla, “the spice of civilization. Cure fish, preserve meat.” The old man had stared out across where the great shallow ocean had once been, now a desert landscape scorched dry by the sun. “Salt t’taste.”

Doug stared some more up the hole. An exit, maybe? There’s always a way out.

But not right now.

The small swampy marsh trickled out to nothing here against the stone wall. The water bubbled up from a crack in the rock, the water black as it flowed into the marsh. It was simple to step over this far southern end to get to the west.

Here, there was smaller stone and patches of dry dirt out of the marsh. Doug found the cactus he had seen from the other side, in stone terraces full of sandy soil.

And it was back to the hippies from the ‘70’s theory. He looked up at the eye on the stone, and wondered if they’d done it from scratch, or if they’d desecrated a real yoni to get their All Seeing Eye. He kneeled on his good knee and studied the very old, very button-laden Peyote.

Doug had never seen a real Peyote cactus in the wild. They were not native to this region. Doug counted five Peyote, and several other cacti that he could not identify, in the tiers that ended up against the ten-foot wall. Someone had carried these plants from very far away to plant them here.

Doug turned back to the lifeless pool below, then shifted his attention to the built-up wall and the Datura plants growing on the ridge. He had to concentrate on the wet stone, and found himself focusing on several roots that water dripped off of. He followed the roots up to the Datura and the soil around it.

Doug fell back on his haunches, watched the water leech through the stone, across the roots, drip down to the pool below, felt the coppery poison in his mouth, his stomach, his blood.

“Sacred Datura, Taloche, Thorn Apple, Jimson Weed,” Sam had chanted. “You take too little, it just gets you good and sick. Take too much, and you’re dead.” He’d picked his tooth with a twig of brittlebush. “I once tried peyote. Once.” He had stared at the fire. “No great revelations, no greater insight into the Meaning of life, no new-found link to the spirit world. Never had such a screaming hangover of a headache.”

“What haven’t you tried?” Doug asked. Sam’s features had twisted with irritation.

“Hey, I’m not bragging here. Thirty years ago I did the drug scene. I’m not advocating it, I’m not condemning it. It just is.”

The burst of anger was rare, but Doug felt the tug of animus as well. Old bastard bragged about his sexcapades, his drug adventures, no one else’s could match. Doug had held his tongue on that, but did press.

“Did you ever do Jimson Weed?”

Sam shook his head, the look of annoyance hanging on.

“Anybody I know who’s ever tried it, tried it once, and that was the end of it. It’s not a recreational drug. You’re guaranteed a bum trip, and then you have this screaming hangover afterward, like peyote, I guess. Psychotropic hallucinogen. An alkaloid.” Sam had seemed to perk up a bit as he looked over at Doug, them both sitting close to stay in the heat of the fire, but out of the smoke. “Have any idea what that means?”

Doug had shook his head and suddenly didn’t dare make eye contact with the old bastard who glared at him now.

“Me neither. What I’ve read is, Datura works mechanically. Unlike acid or PCP, which screws with the chemistry in the brain, Datura just dehydrates it, dries the brain out. No wonder you hallucinate.”

And with that Sam had lunged at Doug. It was a cross between a punch and a bite that happened so fast and hard, Doug was on the ground staring at the flesh torn from his shoulder, the strike so sudden, the traumatized wound was not yet bleeding. He didn’t feel pain so much as violated. Doug did let out a yelp when Sam slammed a metal tent stake through Doug’s boot, then howled sharply as Sam stepped on the head of the spike to bury it deep. Doug watched dumbstruck as the old bastard washed Doug’s flesh down with his beer. The old man had glowered with a casual malice Doug had never seen before.

“Stay put,” Sam had said as he chucked the empty bottle aside. “I’m not done with you.”

Doug snapped back from the memory, looked out from his perch. It took him a moment to realize that there had been no memory like that, that some waking phantasm had stolen in on his recollection. He tried to find in the sequence of events where the reminiscence had warped into the nightmare, and horror, and a queer sense of loss, overtook him as he realized he couldn’t find the point.

Doug jerked up a second time, aware again of his surroundings. The light had changed markedly. Instead of the blinding white stone reflecting back and forth amongst themselves, shadows stretched out from boulders that now had a golden, even rust, glow. He looked back over his shoulder to the south. The sun had moved a long long distance since the last time he’d looked.

I gotta get out’a here,” he said out loud. He tried to rise, but found that the back of his legs and rear had melted into the stone he sat on.

Pushing up was useless. He rolled to one side, and even though his hands began to sink into the partially liquid stone, he could free his legs. In a moment he was up on his feet, and he sucked his arms up, then started walking south to where he could get to the other side of the marsh. He had to get back to his pack, then to the cave. Yes, the cave had to be the way out of here. It had the four dots of an arrow. He looked around at the walls that made the bowl, paused for a moment, and realized they were melting in the shadows. He could smell them melting.

No time to dawdle, get back to his pack. Doug cut the corner and splashed across some of the marsh, through reeds that whistled as they brushed against him.

Doug got back to the step down to where his pack was, on the boulder shore to the lifeless water.

The boulders had risen. His pack must have been a hundred, two hundred feet down from where he stood.

No, its not, he told himself. The rocks hadn’t grown, nor were they melting in the shadows. He was not melting into the stone. He was hallucinating. It was all an hallucination, and he was going to be suffering from it for a long time, hours, even days.
He could not, however, deny the sense that he stood on a two hundred foot tall precipice. He could not step down that huge distance, grab his pack, and then step back up here again. Wasn’t going to happen. Doug got down on his stomach, did his best to ignore the sinking feeling as he melted again into the stone, and reached down from the cliff, down toward where he could just see his pack. His arm stretched and stretched until finally he could feel the pack. He had to push himself out even further to finally get a grasp and pull the pack up the two hundred feet to the top of the cliff. The pack was bone dry now, having sat in the sun for hours.

Doug rolled over, sucking himself back up out of the stone, then struggled to his feet. He turned and started south, ignoring whistling marsh reeds, the ominous lurking frogs and the liquid balls of rock running alongside him.

When he got to the far end of the bowl, he couldn’t find the cave. It was gone.

Doug put his backpack down and started feeling the stones before him with his hands. His fingers sinking to the first knuckle into the stone did not help matters.

It had been right here, he told himself. Right here. He had stood just west of here, looked left and had seen the rabbit hole of a cave entrance and the four black dots. He stepped back. The hole and the black dots were gone.

Had he hallucinated it? Grimly he acknowledged the possibility. He now had no idea how long he’d been suffering the affects of the poison. He contemplated his options, and went back to patting the rock, looking for the cave entrance, the four black dots. He moved slowly west until he was nearly to the water pumping out of the rock. For a moment he studied the spring, and realized it wasn’t just water. There were other things in the water, nitrates and potassium and phosphates.

Doug turned away from the water. The thought of it made him nauseous. He looked to the left, and just like that, eye level, the four dots appeared. Below them, the entrance to the cave.

Doug pushed off from the rock wall and started walking toward the cave, right where he thought it was, where he’d been searching.

They disappeared again, both the dots and the cave entrance.

Doug stopped, studied the spot where he knew the dots had to be, the cave right below them, then stepped back up against the wall. The dots and cave re-appeared.

Magic. Some kind of spell cast upon the stone. Doug felt a spasm of fear course through him. He did not know the ways of magic, having up until this moment always assumed it did not exist.

Doug kept his head as close as he could to the wall and started stepping toward the dots. The wall undulated slightly, but so did his head, and in four steps, Doug was at the entrance to the rabbit hole.

As Doug lowered himself down, the cave entrance grew proportionally, until it was a massive chasm. Without taking his eyes off it, Doug reached over and grabbed his pack. To his utter amazement, he and his pack could not fit together through this massive gap. He set his pack aside and started into the hole, figuring he could somehow haul the pack in behind him.

Doug thought of ‘The Witch and the Wardrobe’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and all the other books he’d been obliged to read to his kids. He did not want adventure. He wanted out of this place.

It was dark in the cave. Doug had to crawl, and the cave went up. The bottom of it was covered with sand and salt, and the further he went in the saltier it became.

The salt could not be naturally here, he told himself. Not like this, not this much. It had been hauled here. There was something else, something becoming more potent than the salt against his forearms and elbows. It was cold.

There was the slightest breeze coming down from above, and it was cold and dry.

Doug stopped and thought about that for a long time, then decided he should get his little tool. It was then that he realized it was pitch dark in the cave, and he needed his flashlight. He could sense that somewhere up ahead the cave was going to open up. With a great deal of effort and trial and error, he finally managed to work his pack up past him, get out his flashlight, find the button that turned it on, find the thermometer and humidity thingey, hold it up for what seemed a short time, and after some effort, realizing he could not read the numbers on the tool to save his life. It all looked like Klingon.

Doug put the tool down, absently wondered what good getting out of the bowl would do him if he was this stoned, when he shined the light further up the cave.

Doug snapped his head back and slammed into something hard, no melting into this rock. Stars fell like jeweled beads down from his face to the salty sand he collapsed to. Before passing out he focused one more time up the cave.

The body of the man was in pretty good shape, considering half his face was eaten away. Tank top, cowboy hat, long blonde hair. That was all Doug could see of the man. He had obviously been trying to crawl out when he had died.

Partially mummified, Doug thought before passing out.

Doug felt the broken bones in his palms grate against the metal stake that pinned his hands out above him. He tasted it in his mouth. His chest was bare, his T-shirt ripped away. Sam must have stoked the fire. The demon light of the flames’ danced over both of them. Sam, standing above him, pulled his old Buck knife out, knelt before Doug.

“No, please,” Doug begged.

With an ease that bespoke of practice, Sam split Doug, crotch to breast bone. The blade made a ripping sound as it slit his skin. Doug gagged as his intestines, liver, kidneys liquidly spilt onto the sandy desert soil, the feeling of voiding as painful as the cut. Doug’s screams only added to the agony, the bottom of his lungs quivering in the open.

“Hey, pass out.” Sam sheathed his knife. “I don’t need your company while I eat.”

“Mercy!” Doug croaked. “Kill me!”

Sam shook his head as he knelt down on Doug’s entrails, a dull ache where they pulled on Doug’s chest cavity.

“If it’s one thing old Cougar has taught me, it’s that the meat’s the best eatin’, while the heart’s still beatin’.” Sam put a knee on a section of intestines, bent over, made eye contact with Doug.

“Now you know what happened to old George.”

Sam bit in, then wrenched up with the intestines in his teeth.

Doug jolted awake, looked around him, still in the rabbit hole. His light still shined brightly at the cowboy mummy blocking the hole. The walls now were melting out into the sand, a steady stonefall all around.

Doug shoved back, crawled back, hauling his pack with him. When he finally escaped the hole he rolled over and let himself sink some into the stone wall.

He was amazed by the sight of the black sky to the north. The stars swirled around the north star, and the quarter moon moved across the sky.

At one point Doug looked away as a thought crossed his mind. Sam hadn’t eaten George. George, just a couple years younger than Sam, had always struck Doug as a lonely man, more of a hanger-on than one of the guys. Played the fiddle, pretty damn well really. Sam got the biggest kick out of George playing around the camp fire, everyone wanting to learn the words so they could sing along. Doug had always wondered if George had learned to play just to be able to fit in somewhere. He was otherwise a boring bland little man, prone to saying things vaguely uncomfortable, and usually only incidentally related to the conversation or what was happening at the time. Then George got himself a girlfriend about a third his age, and bit by bit had begged off from desert treks he was invited to. Finally they’d stopped calling him. Doug had run into the girlfriend only a few years back at a 7-11 in Lakeside. She and George had split up, but George had never bothered to re-kindle his old friendships, maybe realizing he really didn’t care for the desert or Doug or Sam or all the others, who, Doug came to realize, had also disappeared, moved away, parted company over the years.

Doug looked down on himself, and was amazed to see stars moving across him.

Not stars, sprites, or some kind of Tinker Bells. Glowing blue-ish gray with a hint of purple, they moved across him, nearly round, reflecting the dull light of the moon and even the stars. There was regular flow of these little lights coming from the marsh. After a moment of watching, he knew that he would sleep now. He dreamt many horrible things, being eaten alive a central theme to many of his nightmares, but none could match Sam’s callous betrayal.

The headache was beyond comprehension, far past a hangover. A concussion? Gingerly Doug touched the back of his head. The blood felt dry. Doug could not find a comfortable position on the ground. He dare not open his eyes, it all hurt too much. The only reprieve from the agony was smells and sounds, both pleasant.

Water. He had to get water. Where was his canteen? He had to open his eyes.

The sun was high in the sky, but he was in the shade in the southern end of the bowl, not too far away from the cave entrance. His flesh quivered from a cold breeze sweeping out of its entrance. His joints ached when he moved, and it felt like cactus needles had been stuck in his scrotum. His skin hung slack from his bones.

Doug did not want to stand up. The pressure in his head kept him low to the ground. He studied his backpack. The bladder of potable water within had not yet been touched.

I haven’t drunk water since some time yesterday, he thought. Not good. He hauled out the bladder, pulled away the protective plastic cap, then held the half gallon of water above him as he pressed the button. Gatorized water flowed into his mouth. It was only then he noticed something attached to the right corner of his lower lip. He rubbed at it but it dangled off the swipe like a pendulum. He grabbed at it, and knew without seeing what it was.

A tick. He shuddered with the reality. Doug pulled at it and it felt like grabbing a broken bone sticking out of his skin. He gagged at the new intense pain and rolled over so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit, that came up a viscous brown, bits of the Dutch Oven stew still on his stomach.

He lay there gasping, staring at his almost digested last dinner when he had a new thought. Tentatively he felt his matted hair.

All across his head, especially behind his ears, he found more ticks, fat bloated ticks. He sat up suddenly, ignoring the swirling ache that sloshed around his head as he ripped off his clothes.

They were everywhere. In his armpits, his crotch, the back of his knees, the cheeks of his ass. The ones on his privates, gray and bulbous, appeared huge. None were smaller than a quarter of an inch long, some just about a half inch. He looked down at his clothes. Ticks thronged over his socks, pants, underwear, shirt.

A gag and a curt scream escaped Doug’s lips as he stood there naked. He thought to start tearing at them, digging them out of his flesh, but the pain of the tick on his lip gave him pause, time to consider some other possibilities.

Was he still hallucinating? The rocks weren’t melting anymore. The colors were not the same intense trip through the saturation option on Photoshop. The mind-numbing headache gave him every reason to believe he was still in his own body, but he still felt queer, as if he stood outside himself.

If they weren’t a phantasm, how do you get rid of ticks? He’d never had a tick before. He started thinking about something Sam had said once, then physically turned away from the memory, forcing it out of his thoughts.

You can’t just jerk out a tick, Doug remembered from some source. The head and the needle-fine tube that they drain your blood out with would remain behind, become infected, causing a whole slew of new problems.

His little tom-boy sister had had a tick once. Their father had taken a cigarette, and with immense patience, gently threatened the tick with the hot tip until it finally backed out.

That was not an option. Besides having no cigarettes, he couldn’t even see most of the damn filthy things in his hair.

Doug looked down at his clothes again. The ticks were swarming off them, headed directly toward him.

In a fit he jumped over the insect horde, scooped up his pants, T-shirt, underwear and socks, and gingerly ran to the edge of the wall. From there Doug flung each article of clothing into the dead water.

He suddenly felt faint. Doug sat down hard on the rock and his naked ass scraped across the stone. He fought the nausea, closed his eyes until the swirling dizziness backed off some. He could feel each one, especially the ones in his crotch, their sharp legs squirming, their blood-sucking heads digging. Squalid violation.

His two-quart canteen was down on the boulder beach. Above it, over the lifeless pool was the All Seeing Eye, staring at the naked man covered with ticks. Doug stared down the eye for a moment, then carefully, stepped off the wall onto the rock and walked prudently to where his canteen sat out in the sun. The canteen was nearly too hot to hold.

In the African Queen, Humphrey Bogart had to get out of the boat and push it, and when he got back in he was covered with leeches. They took salt and spread them on the leeches and they fell off.

Ticks were not like leeches, slug-like flesh, but salt was an irritant on flesh, like a hot cigarette tip. Doug rose unsteadily to his feet.

Even as he walked purposely toward his backpack, his plan evolved. When he got back to his boots, he picked one up and smacked the ticks all around. Rock against boot, they burst, some with crimson blood in their sacks. He opened the canteen and tried to drink the water. Too hot. When he got to his pack, he didn’t bother hunting around for the few packs of salt he might have in the side pockets left over from past hiking trips. Instead he determined to transfer the water in the canteen to the half-filled water bladder.

His hands shook, his breath was ragged and his eyes burned. Several times he had to stop and calm himself, fighting the panic and disgust that gripped him. Nausea and dizziness struck him several times, and he wondered if the ticks on his scrotum weren’t the equivalent of a kick in the nuts.

The water transferred, Doug made another attempt to drink. Now the mix in the bladder was tepid, but still drinkable. He forced himself to swallow more, even with the filthy tick at his lip. He thought to get some Tylenol out of his first aid kit, and washed that down as well. Finally, without rising, he turned toward the south wall.

The cave entrance was gone.

Doug closed his eyes, lowered his throbbing head and rested for a good five minutes, then raised his eyes again to the solid wall. He crawled in a crouch, on all fours but off his knees, across the rocky surface, until he reached the wall. When his face was close to the wall, he looked to his left.

There it was. The four tar black dots and the cave entrance. He slid along the wall, and when he got to the black dots, he stopped and studied them for a moment.

The dots of paint were on an outcrop facing west, but they also had been carefully etched back, more chiseling. The dots themselves faced nearly back into the south wall. Closer inspection showed they were elongated, so that with your face against the rock, they looked round.

Doug lowered down to the three-foot tall entrance of the cave. It too had an outcropping of stone that blended perfectly with the wall. Standing in front of it, you couldn’t see it. Walk up from the right, and it was painfully obvious.

Doug flicked his light on and lowered himself to his knees. He crawled into the cave and started climbing up, the sand and salt digging into his knees. His scraped knee burned.

It was not nearly as cramped a hole as Doug had imagined. Side to side it was four feet, with enough headspace that on hands and knees he was not cramped.

And there it was, the mummified cowboy. Doug had thought he had crawled back a hundred feet before running into it, but it wasn’t ten. As if his heart wasn’t pounding hard enough, now it was in his throat. Doug stared at the features of the man in front of him, skin shriveled, eye sockets empty. A yellow plastic flashlight was in front of the man, the salt had corroded the metal ring around the lens to a powdery white.

Now why the hell couldn’t you be a hallucination, Doug thought. You and the ticks. Doug kept staring even as he pulled his canteen around and started scraping salt up, working it through the canteen mouth. Absently he worried over the process of reporting a body to the police. If he told them about the mummy, then sooner or later they’d figure out the rest, and his discovery would become public. Looters or the Feds, who would do more damage? Doug kept scooping and working until the canteen felt about a third full. With one last look at the cowboy, Doug turned around and got out of the cave.

When Doug got back to his boots, he picked them up one by one, shook them, whacked them on the rock, then inspected them some more. Satisfied they were not infested, he put them on, the only clothing he now wore. He got down to the dead water, squatted, and filled the canteen. When it was three quarters full, he stood, put the cap on, then feverishly shook the contents. The canteen itself was cold to the touch, full of the chilly water from the liveless pool. He thought about that, set the canteen in the sun, and retreated back into the shade, the sun’s rays beginning to irritate his bare flesh.

Give it thirty minutes, Doug thought through the fog of his headache.

It was only then he remembered his cell phone. He never wore a wrist watch in the desert, that was for work. His GPS didn’t have a clock. The only time piece he really had was his phone. He crawled over to his pack, pulled open the Velcro flap. His phone slid out in its plastic bag.

A thrill of hope rushed through him. He opened it and turned it on. “Looking for Service” it proclaimed.

Doug lowered his head, the ache too great to keep it up any longer. When he finally looked again at the phone, the screen read, “No Service available”.

It was the first time Doug had stopped to think about what kind of trouble he was in. The very fact that he hadn’t had a chance to think, only to react to the situation, certainly was a part of the situation. First falling into the pool, trying to get out, successfully being poisoned, successfully smacking his head hard enough to where he wondered about a concussion. Now an infestation of ticks. He had been kept busy. At some point, he was going to have to stop, take stock, take inventory. First, though, he added with a shiver, get rid of the ticks.

Doug had never heard of someone being overrun with ticks. Where had they come from in such numbers?

Bloodshot eyes looked to the marsh. Without taking his eyes off it, Doug backed up the eastern rock wall as far as he could, into a large crevice with a slab of stone sitting in the middle of it.

He checked his phone’s clock. 12:37. It had been about a half hour.

Doug’s legs seemed to lack bone, and not much muscle. He tried crawling a short distance, but it was too rough on his knees. His depth perception was screwed, and he nearly toppled off the wall to the boulder shore. He reached the canteen, raised it and shook it hard again for a long time. It now took every ounce of effort to stand so that he could pour the brine water over him, making sure none got in his mouth.

When it hit his wound in the back of his head, Doug nearly passed out, falling to his hands and knees. What else did you expect? he thought, gritting his teeth. Salt on a wound. The stabbing pain subsided to a gnawing ache, Doug made a point to bath the tick at his lip in the brine, then poured it over his whole body, except for his thoroughly scraped knee from yesterday. It had already been salted. He sat back to saturate the tick on his testicles and scrotum, then slapped it up between his ass cheeks. The brine started getting thick. Doug refilled the canteen and shook it hard, then put the canteen down in the sun.

He sat back for a moment there on the boulder shore, and waited.

The brine water evaporated quickly in the hot desert air, until the salt began to cake on Doug’s flesh, his skin beginning to protest the direct sunlight on its raw spots. Just when Doug began to fear it wouldn’t work, something twitched on his lips, and unceremoniously the tick there slid off, rolling head over heals off Doug’s chest.

Doug felt twitching and pulling all over him, and he had to rest his head on the rock until the last of the ticks on his privates fell away. He watched the agonized creatures, with salt clinging to their legs, staggering about. He chose not to crush them. Seeing his own blood staining the stone would bring him no joy.

Doug sagged and smiled with immense relief as he slid his hand through his hair. He also felt something of an accomplishment, a change of fortune through effort. Adversity had been met and overcome.

Roughly one in the afternoon, Doug thought as he inspected himself for any stragglers. I’ve been here twenty-four hours.

His skin began to itch. Doug crawled back into the shade, but the itching grew worse.

Salt on the skin, Doug thought. Irritant to ticks, irritant to you.

After a moment’s thought, a few calculations about the best way to go about it, Doug walked back onto the boulder shore, eased himself down onto his rear, then slid into the lifeless pool, his boots once again filling with water.

Doug knew the water was poisoned, but he wasn’t going to drink it, just soak in it, wash off the salt and sweat.

First he scrubbed himself, especially the scraped up parts, his butt, legs, toes. Then he slid down, the cold water tensing his muscles, him sucking air in until he was on his knees. He eased himself back and washed his hair, careful not to get any of the water in his mouth. The cold water on his fevered head felt good. As he grew more used to the temperature, Doug noticed that the water of the lifeless pool had a curiously velvety texture, as if it had been treated, softened.

“Johnny Lang,” Sam had said over the tombstone.

Doug shot up from the water and froze.

“Found partially mummified inside his canvas sleeping bag.” Sam had looked down upon the simple concrete block just off the Keys Overlook Road, sadly laughed, then laid a penny on the grave. “It was in winter, and in the cold dry air of the Joshua Tree high desert, his body had dehydrated and been preserved. They figured there was so little meat on his bones, the local critters didn’t waste time chewing on him.”

There was a cold breeze coming out of the cave. Cold and dry. The animals hadn’t been kept away completely, something had chewed on the Cowboy’s face, tearing off the lips and eyes, but still, why wasn’t this cowboy’s bones scattered all over the place? How long had he been there?

Doug stood, picked up his underwear from the bottom of the pool, picked drowned ticks from it, crushing them as he went. The water was very cold, and the sun hot. He dipped down in the water to cool off as he went through his socks, shorts, shirt. Each one he inspected for ticks, each tick he crushed, and at least half spurt blood into the oddly soft water. He counted fifteen glutted with his blood. That didn’t include the ones he’d forced off his body.

How do ticks work, he asked himself. Didn’t they just latched on and make themselves at home until, well, what?

He had to get out of this place, Doug thought as he worked his way back out of the pool.

“How?” Sam had asked incredulously. “You can’t hop from boulder t’boulder, they’re all too big! I’m telling you, it’s just not possible.”

“Bet’cha from down there, the trail is obvious,” Doug had argued, and it was.

He had to get up above these walls, then back to the Five Shaman’s Cave. From there he could walk out the way he’d come in.

He studied the discolored boulders around him, calculated fissures and would-be steps. He stopped several times in the shade to rest, sat down on a boulder, held his head in his hands in hopes the throbbing would pass. He felt an inner shiver that would not leave him. A searing case of heartburn stopped him again to get into his first aid kit. He continued to study the bowl as he pulled out a small bag full of antacids. The Tums had turned to powder, but he opened the bag, shook the contents into his mouth, and washed it down with tepid Gatorade. The chest pain left immediately. His dilemma did not. Doug spent a good hour walking around the length of the bowl, stepping on stones and seeing where a foothold to climb might be found. Several observations distracted him. Where every inch of his body had ached from something earlier, now, since bathing in the liveless pool, his skin and scalp felt invigorated, as if he’d laid in a hot springs tub. The aspirin must have started to kick in, his head went from about-to-explode to a light throbbing. Now his eyes burned, his mouth was dry. His stomach growled, but the thought of eating made him nauseous. Besides, he’d left his food back in the little cold cave, except for maybe some energy bars that were now thoroughly soaked in the lifeless pool.

Doug drank water from the water bladder, the canteen now contaminated with salt and lifeless pool water. He felt a sinking feeling now, the first solid grasping hand of despair.

There was no way out of the bowl. The boulder walls around him rose at least eight feet high with no roll to them, no footholds, no place to grasp. He thought he spotted where there might have been an outcrop from some of the boulders, chiseled off who knows how many years ago. Doug looked over at the All Seeing Eye, its taunting stare fixing exclusively on him. This was some kind of ancient trap, well thought out, meticulously fabricated, and he was stuck. He physically shuddered.

“Panic will kill you quicker than a snake bite,” Sam had said.

Again Doug turned away from the memory, but it kept talking

“It’ll kill you for sure.”

The fuzz in Doug’s brain made him lower his head back into his hands.

“You have to pause, think, take stock, check for every option, then test them one at a time until you find a way out.”

“Or over,” Doug finished, “or around.”

They were in a slot canyon, Sam sitting on a sandstone block, holding his army-style canteen in one hand, a Granola Bar in the other. Where was it? Canyon Sin Nombre or Coyote Canyon. And when? He couldn’t place it. Where were the kids? They always came on the easy hikes, the wife would come for the Spring flowers, but they weren’t there.

“Is this a memory?” Doug whispered out loud.

Sam had continued contemplating the ground, pulling his floppy hat off his head, his gray hair sticking out in all directions.

“Well, now, what is a memory? Something we remember,” The old man glanced up at Doug before returning his attention to his boots. “the way we choose to remember it.” Sam adjusted himself on his sandstone seat. “You throw in poisoning, dehydration, possible anemia,” Sam had looked up at Doug, straight in the face. “Well, you’d be a damn fool t’trust your memories.”

Doug nodded. Sam had shrugged as he looked back down at the sand.

“Might be a tool, though. Help sort things out, organize the internal conversation.”

“I thought I was supposed to still the internal conversation,” Doug countered. Sam looked up again.

“Later.”

Sam turned his attention to the trail ahead, up the canyon, the polished sandstone walls closing in on them. “Help you focus on what you gotta do t’get out’a here.”

“There’s no way out,” Doug whispered.

“You can’t say that,” Sam countered. “You haven’t explored all your options.” Sam seemed to wait on his perch before turning back to Doug. “You haven’t checked out the salted cave.”

Doug blinked and furrowed his brow.

“There’s a corpse blocking the entrance.”

“You have to move the cowboy, Doug,” Sam answered bluntly.

Doug closed his eyes, felt faint as he shook his head. He pictured touching the dead man, shoving him, his leathery flesh tearing and out pouring maggots, the hole suddenly filling with the stench of rot.

“That boy’s way past the rot stage, Doug. You see any flies, smell anything, even being downwind? No, the cowboy rotted out a decade ago.” Sam had leapt to his feet, scooping his backpack and holstering his canteen all in one smooth motion.

“Come on, let’s go!”

No. He was not ready. The headache and hangover had dissipated. Now Doug could feel his sore joints, his eyes burn, but most of all, his exhaustion. He needed to rest. Just a few hours and he would be better, he knew it.

Doug rose, walked over to his backpack. In one of the side pockets were single-shot packets of sunscreen. He always had them for the kids. He grabbed two of them, and his temperature/humidity tool. The thermometer read a balmy ninety degrees, the humidity a staggering fifteen percent. Doug looked at the water, so nearby, enclosed in this bowl, thought a moment, then walked back to where the hidden cave entrance was. He knelt and lowered his tool close to it, where he could feel the breeze.

The temperature dropped to eighty degrees, the humidity, seven per cent.

Doug looked back over the bowl, the All-Seeing-Eye watching him.

“This desert nightmare air-conditioned for your convenience,” he whispered.

There were chores to do. He dragged his backpack over to the stone he had figured to be the furthest point away from the swamp, pulled out the Carmex, went down into the sun and got his canteen. He had to carry it by its strap, it was so hot. He got back to the shade, the flat stone furthest away from the marsh on the east side. It stood alone in a small vestibule of rock. Suddenly Doug realized as he shook the canteen, the eight foot long stone, standing alone, flat surface, looked like an altar.

Doug let out a ragged sigh as he opened the canteen full of hot brine water. He looked once again at the swamp, studied the rock floor between him and it as he poured out the salty sludge onto the rock, pouring a circle around the altar. Finished, he sat down on the slab, pulled out the Carmex and slathered his lips, the outside corner of his eyes, his nostrils, and as an afterthought, behind his ears. Then he pulled out the kids’ sunscreen. Somewhere on the back he thought he’d read something about it also being a bug repellent. He didn’t check now, but instead jerked his pants down and slathered his privates, his armpits, the back of his knees, his neck, and finally his hair and scalp.

He didn’t think he could stand up if he wanted to. Instead, he pulled his backpack around so he could lay on it. Just a couple of hours, he probably wouldn’t even sleep. It was a slab of stone, after all. Just rest his eyes. He couldn’t help but think there really wasn’t any hurry. He had water, some snacks he might be able to rescue. And it was a beautiful place, full of its own wonders. He was the one who had made all the mistakes, he still had his senses, he knew his limitations. He’d get out. There was always a way out.

Doug jerked up awake. Every joint in his body was sore, but his mind was clear.

And it was maybe two hours to sunset. His breath came out in a ragged sigh. He’d slept the day away.

But now, finally, he knew what he had to do.

Absently he checked his hair for ticks, felt relief when he found none. He gathered up his canteen, repacked his backpack. No reason to come back for it. Doug felt suddenly convinced the salted cave was a way out of here. What else could it be?

Another air conditioner cave, maybe, but that would still mean there was a way out.

And bats. Doug paused at the entrance, thought about that, then put his hat on with the tie underneath his chin, pulled his scarf out of his backpack and wrapped it around his neck. He wished he had a long-sleeve shirt, but he didn’t.

First things first, move the cowboy.

Once again, Doug came face to face with the corpse.

The body lay on a series of stones that rose up into the entrance to what Doug sensed was an actual cave and not just a tunnel, perhaps ten feet further up. Doug put his Mini-Mag between his teeth, freeing up both hands. He’d thought about dragging the Cowboy out, but if parts fell off, that would mean he would have to crawl over them to explore the cave. Instead, he had decided to see if he could push the cowboy back into the cave. Only a couple of inches away from the corpse’s face, Doug swallowed as best he could with the flashlight separating his jaws, sighed, and placed a hand on each of the mummy’s shoulders, then gently shoved.

The mummy was not stiff. It folded back on itself, the chest lifting off the salty rock for the first time in probably decades, the head drooping, coming horribly closer to Doug’s face. It smelled like dusty leather and ammonia. Doug grunted again, and figured the corpse was six feet long and weighed forty pounds. The hips leveraged up on the thigh bones. Something collapsed within the leathery flesh, but Doug still managed to manhandle the cowboy up back into the cave proper, and work him to the left, out of the way. With the light falling the length of the corpse’s body, Doug could see more detail besides the hat and shirt. Levi jeans with some kind of Indian beaded belt, Vasque hiking boots with lots of tread. Doug was thinking about whether he should check for a wallet, for I.D., when his light flashed across the cave.

Doug dropped straight down, back into the tunnel. He scrambled out back into the bowl and slapped himself against the stone wall as he gasped for air, his heart pounding harder than he could imagine. He looked down to the cave entrance and took several tentative steps away from it.

There were people in the cave.

Doug tried to remember what he’d seen for only a flash of a second. They were not looking at him, but they were all smiling gently, kindly. How many? Maybe three, more? They were sitting, silent, perhaps sleeping. One had a turban on.

A hallucination?

He decided almost immediately that he had to return. He pulled the water bladder out of his backpack, drank from it, realized he hung on the horns of a dilemma. He was low on water, even as he knew he had not drunk nearly enough.

Doug waited until his heart had reached normal, then he waited a little longer to build up the courage. Finally, he crouched down and re-entered the tunnel. When he reached the cave, he eased his head up, flashlight once again in his teeth.

The cave was perhaps fifteen feet across, roughly the same deep, with a seven foot roof at the highest point. Seated along the left rear wall were five people.

Doug pulled his eyes away from the quiet figures after a moment and threw the light around the cave. The walls were covered with pictrographs. There were pottery and ancient tools against the walls. At the very rear, the boulders that made the cave split, and the now familiar four tar-black dots pointed up.

Not yet, Doug thought, not without some answers.

The air smelled curiously clean, almost disinfected. A cold breeze fell around Doug, rushing past him into the tunnel, until it finally was uncomfortable to stand there in the hole of an entrance. He brought his attention back to the five figures, sighed, then crawled up into the cave and approached them. After a moment, he sat down across from them. Though they were together, they were not equal.

The first figure to the left had been a portly fellow. Doug couldn’t guess his height, but he wore a skirt made of grasses and Doug suspected palm fronds, and wore a cap of something similar. The costume reminded Doug of a native from the South Pacific, although not quite. The years had not been gentle with this corpse. Most of the flesh had fallen from his face and chest, and although still leather, made a messy appearance in his display. There was a tarry black paint on what remained of his chest, and the same color was on the rock behind him.

The second figure, with a burgundy red stain on his bare chest and the stone behind him, was in better shape, but his flesh too was coming off his bones, one eye socket bare and exposed. He looked dusty and disheveled. A cloth was wrapped around his head like a turban. Doug thought he’d seen the curious pattern on the cloth at some museum, a pattern used by Southern California tribes. The old man’s chest was bare, jewelry adorned his neck and arms. A blanket that, for all the world looked Navajo, lay across his lap, and on it were several thorny Datura seed pods, root and leaves that Doug guessed were also Datura, button-sized objects that Doug recognized as Peyote, some dried-up fungus-looking thing, and then a black, thin cracker-sized material that Doug could not identify.

As Doug’s attention shifted to the third figure, he absently pulled his backpack up beside him, pulled his thermometer/humidity device out, and hung it on the pack’s frame.

The third figure struck a memory in Doug’s head. It had nothing especially memorable about it, except that its condition had improved over the last. A simple blanket hung over one shoulder across his chest, leather and cloth breech clout, a headband kept his long white hair neat. Its crossed feet were shod in sandals made of palm fronds that Doug had once again seen in a museum. Sitting in front of him on the salt floor was something that looked like it might belong in a museum as well, an insect, a tick, with a pin neatly skewering it into a square block of wood, made a fine display piece.

Doug’s heart had been eerily calm, but it began to pound as two things struck him. He knew nothing of ticks, but the one on display was big and gray and ugly like the ones he’d fought off that morning. The second shock was that this figure’s blanket and the wall behind it was of a dark rust color that he’d seen only once before. Not taking his eyes off the figures before him, Doug struggled with his backpack, finally looking away to get at his cell phone. He spotted his weather tool as he wrestled. The temperature was seventy degrees Fahrenheit, humidity was below ten per cent.

The Velcro crackled open, the cell phone fell into his hands. Feverishly Doug fiddled with the buttons until the camera setting came up, and he hit ‘review’, ‘ENTER’.

There they were, the full-sized stick figures from the cave of the Five Shamans. He now moved onto the fourth figure seated before him, noted that the figures were not in sequence, that the forth stick figure, burgundy red, was second in this line-up, the fourth figure before him, the third figure in the other cave.

The fourth figure here, tan red on chest and wall, was dressed similarly to the second figure, except this mummy was in fine condition. His nimble thin hands lay open to his sides, his head canted ever so slightly to the left, a gentle yet rapturous smile gracing his lips, as if he were in ecstasy. His eyes were closed as were they all, but these eyelids also had a rounded shape, as if there was still eyes behind them.

The last figure looked as if he’d sat down that morning for his picture to be taken. Stocky, he wore a clean straw Stetson on top of a head with a tidy haircut, horn-rimmed glasses that perched at the end of his nose, a clean white shirt, bolo tie, a black leather vest, Levi blue jeans, a leather belt with a fat silver and turquoise buckle. His only capitulation to the place was his palm frond sandals. He smiled silently down at the gourd cup he had, brimming with salt. There was a small amount of salt on the old man’s lips.

And before each figure, there was a pile of trinkets. Gourd rattles, amulets and jewelry, coins and small pots, and then on top of them, car keys, pocket calculators, compasses, maps, a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses.

“Y’know, y’read a lot about the mystical side of the Indian cultures, how the presence of spirits was perceived in everything. An Eagle flying over was an omen, the shamans could predict how the acorn crop would be in the coming year by the mood of the trees and the spirits within.” Sam had stared off toward the horizon, a stone or something small in his hand that he rolled around. “But, don’t you wonder if maybe the Indians had reached a point of spiritual decadence.”

Doug wrinkled his brow.

“I don’t know if I get what you mean.”

Sam motioned his finger at the sunset, the look on his face intense.

“I’m not even sure if I know what I mean. But look, you have all these people, tribes, across two continents, most living this supernatural life, and in comes a culture more technologically advanced, but totally unprepared for this environment, and arguably inferior on the mystical plane, and these older, more spiritually-aware cultures simply dissolve away.” Sam turned toward Doug. “They vanish, leaving nary a clue of their greatness. The Hopi and the Navaho are the only major tribes that are practicing their ancient ways without interruption, and they may be survivors only because they’re so damn remote.”

“European diseases killed off an awful lot before the white man even showed up in the neighborhood,” Doug offered speculatively.

Sam nodded, working his jaw side to side.

“And most of the tribes seem to have had an oral tradition rather than a written one, and those that did write it down got it burned by the padres.” Sam nodded. “Okay, take the Ghost Dance Cult from the turn of the century. Injuns were gonna dance the White Man away. I don’t remember the exact logic, but it spread across the country, from tribe to tribe. All these different cultures come together without a hassle, all the Red Folk set t’dancing. Different nations, different religions, all joining the same, ostensibly, religious cult.” Sam nodded, looking at Doug. “Say what you want, but I’m thinking you’ve got a lot of people living on the same continent, and they have certain shared values. This Ghost Dance Cult made sense to all those people. I contend cults are a sure sign of cultural decadence, decay. The people were not satisfied with the status quo, the institutions that existed within the culture weren’t meeting their needs, so they either formed or got recruited into a cult. And who says this was the only or first cult, this Ghost Dancer Cult? Ten thousand years of culture before the White Man shows, and you’re going to tell me there was never any social disorder? And then there’s the very definition of what spiritual means. Christians seek redemption, forgiveness, salvation from spirituality. Buddhists and Taoists seek enlightenment. Hindis seek progression to a higher plane. Muslims, I think, seek the truth, but don’t quote me on that. What did the Indians seek? Overall, what did they want from spirituality?”

Doug shook his head.

“It may be a cliché.” Sam continued, “but time and again I’ve read about some medicine man having or seeking powerful medicine. I know, a stereotype, but it seems to me the Indian cultures for the most part sought power through spirituality. It’s not a unique thought. Animists and Satanists preach power.”

“Satanists?” Doug argued. Sam held up a hand.

“I’m trying to be value neutral here. I’m not judging, I’m just thinking out loud.”

Doug nodded.

“So, where does that get us?”

“I don’t know,” Sam answered instantly. “But just because you can’t look and see the whole picture of why people did what they did, doesn’t mean you can ignore that they did it.”

The screen on the cell phone faded. It caught Doug’s attention, bringing him back to the cave. He studied the screen, low battery?

No. It wasn’t just the screen, it was the flashlight, it was the refracted sunshine coming up from the tunnel entrance.

He was passing out.

Without thinking or hesitation, Doug flicked his backpack toward the cave entrance and scored a direct hit, the pack falling into the tunnel. Then he leapt for the fading light, down into the tunnel. At first he scrambled for the glow. When his eyes no longer registered even that, he kept scrambling until the sound around him changed. He tried to rear up, but collapsed back to his knees. Still, he was out of the cave.

With his consciousness evaporating he shifted his attention to feeling the wall, heading east as best he could. Then his fingers went numb. His face and legs felt as if they’d fallen asleep. His neck muscles tightened in that unique way when someone’s being strangled.

Doug didn’t know if he had actually passed out. It was dusk. His face and body tingled, like he’d slept on all of them all at once. He chose not to rise, but staggered on all fours to his altar slab.

Oxygen depletion, carbon dioxide poisoning. Anything else Doug could imagine, and he wouldn’t be recovering so quickly, if at all. How long had he been in the cave?

He was thirsty.

“If you feel thirsty,” Sam would say, “you’ve waited too long to drink.”

Doug nodded drunkenly as he looked around for his water. Then he remembered. His water bladder was in his backpack. His backpack was still in the tunnel.

“You’re low on water anyway,” Sam has said casually. “Plenty here, just need t’iodize it.”

“That water?” Doug answered accusingly, pointing at the lifeless pool.

“Not the Datura Punchbowl,” Sam scoffed, then pointed casually at the swamp. “That water.”

The tick swamp.

“If you can’t get out of this bowl, then you’ve got to last until they come looking for you,” Sam said at Doug’s ear. “You can last days without food, but you need water. Two more days and you’re going to come up missing. Your wife is going to call me and I’m not coming out here alone. You talked about this bowl. I was worried you might try to come here alone, in this heat.”

Doug rotated his head to face Sam.

“How could you know that?”

“What’s that?”

“If you’re just a memory, how can you know what Sam was worried about?”

“You heard it in my voice.”

Doug stared into Sam’s unflinching face for a long time before speaking.

“Are you a ghost?”

Sam sharpened his gaze, gritted his teeth.

“Would it make it easier on you if I were? If old Sam had had a massive heart attack or stroke going down the other side of this mountain? That he might be sitting there right now rotting in hundred fifteen degree heat? That he came back to say good-bye to his old buddy and found you in this predicament, want to help you get out of here?”

“Or have company,” Doug countered.

Sam squinted, gritted his teeth. Doug continued.

“You told me to move the cowboy, get into the tunnel. If I’d gone any further in, I wouldn’t have made it out in time.”

“You tell me how a natural cave has some kind of poison gas in it, that doesn’t reek after chlorine or almonds or methane gas. I’ve never heard of such a thing. You tell me how it’s even possible”

Doug took a step so that he and Sam were nose to nose as he hissed.

“You slit me open and ate me alive.”

“The sun’s getting to you, Doug,” Sam answered. “You know that was a hallucination. You’ve got to stay focused. Panic is what kills. You’re not dead, not yet. Where there’s life there’s hope. Do not despair, damnit.”

Doug glared into Sam’s face for another couple of seconds.

“Everything you need to stay alive is in that tunnel,” Sam added. “What are you going to do?”

Doug nodded his head slightly as he stuck his jaw out at the memory, backed up several steps before turning toward the tunnel entrance.

“You’ve realized this is some kind of trap, haven’t you Doug?” Sam had called out after him. “A cruel gruesome ancient trap.”

Doug looked into the tunnel and felt a wave of relief. He had dragged the backpack practically to the entrance and hadn’t even realized it. There was his canteen with the brine water. Doug reached into the steady cool breeze that wafted from the cave and brought his gear out.

It felt as if there were stones in the pack, but Doug knew it was nearly empty. By the time he got to the stone slab, he was wheezing. He pulled out the bladder, searched out his iodine pills.

He stepped toward the swamp.

Thick green reeds that grew no higher than three feet tall were the prominent plant, but there was a large variety of vines and ground cover within, all struggling for light and room. Occasional pools of standing water appeared relatively close to the stone shore and Doug began approaching one of these at the rear of the swamp, near the cave entrance.

Then the swamp shifted. Doug froze, wondering if he’d started hallucinating again, but no, the purple and gray swarm was real.

Hundreds of ticks began surging out of the swamp. Doug took a step back and watched. They covered the solid pieces of ground, they were in all the spots of shade, hanging on the sides of the reeds and underneath leaves of vines. The ones on the ground charged onto the stone beach, faltered, then retreated in waves.

“They smell your blood,” Sam whispered.

Doug’s head swam and he wavered. With a snap of his head he re-focused on the ticks, never taking his eyes off their swarm.

“There’s a finite number of ticks in that space,” Sam said. “And they’re all right here.”

Doug took his boonie hat off, grimaced at the stain and dirt that was on it, made the decision and used the last of his water to wash it out. He sloshed it into the crown and swirled it around. The water leaked through with the dried salt and Datura falling to the stone. It splashed across the stone, spread out, slid down toward the swamp. The moment the moisture reached the dirt, the waves of ticks surged onto the wet rock and swarmed toward its source.

Doug bolted back, but the dripping hat went with him, and the ticks flowed up the trail of water, a squirming mass.

Doug slapped up against the south wall, crushed the moisture from his hat. It splatted at his boots. Doug bounded left. He did not look back as his plan developed. He ran toward the northern end of the swamp, just before the Datura plants, where unceremoniously he fell to his knees, put a fist in his hat and punched it into the swampy soil. The hat filled with only slightly silty water. As it flooded he prepared the bladder, which he also pushed down into the spongy soil. Doug’s hands quivered. He looked south.

He could see the reeds quivering with the weight of the ticks as they moved northward, a purple tinged gray mass moving toward him. He started pulling back.

“You wanna live?” Sam had said over his shoulder in his ear. Doug gritted his teeth.

“Yes.”

“Get as much water as you can. Wait ‘til the last minute.”

A tick straggler started up his arm. Without changing the angle of the mouth of the bladder draining water out his hat, Doug flicked the insect off his arm.

The trick was to keep a seal between bladder and hat so that the water pouring into the bladder went through the hat and at least filtered out some of the solids.

The lead elements of the ticks were a foot away from him when Doug grabbed his hat and bladder and lurched up and away from the edge of the swamp. Then he ran as best he could back to his stone slab on the east side. He took his canteen full of salt water and poured a perimeter around it.

Doug sat cross-legged on the slab as he inspected his prize. He lifted the bladder and figured he’d scored about a gallon.

“You’re going to have to do this again before they find you,” Sam said. “When was the last time you ate?”

Doug paused and thought.

“With you at camp.”

“You’ve got to eat something.”

Doug sniffed the bladder’s mouth and smelled a septic odor.

“Drink this, I’ll consume plenty of solids.”

Doug dropped in four iodine tablets, thought about it, and threw in four more. He swirled it as he watched the swamp. He was too far away to see anything, but he imagined them at the edge closest from where he sat. He closed the mouth of the bladder.

“You’ll need to make up more salt water before nightfall. Any more of that sun block? Let the water stand for a while, let the tablets dissolve, do their thing. Do your chores. Get some salt, fill that canteen. First, put on more lip balm.”

Doug mined the side pockets of his backpack and found a water-soaked-and-dried energy bar.

“It got soaked in the Datura punchbowl,” Sam pointed out. “What are the chances it didn’t get past the wrapper?”

Doug came across a plastic bag full of coffee filters. He’d gotten in the habit of taking a rubber band and wrapping one of these filters around the pre-filter of his water filter. He’d left the water filter in the Jeep, but had somehow missed this cache of coffee filters. He set those next to the semi-filled bladder.

As Doug grabbed his canteen and headed for the salted cave, the memory of Sam kept talking.

“Wonder if those reeds are edible? The Indians used to eat the cactus, even cholla. Would a fire help? Should we find some stuff to make a fire tonight? If we’re stuck here for another night, maybe a little fire. Burn the damn swamp if we could. You got waterproof matches. Wonder if the cowboy would burn good. Okay, not funny.”

Doug braced himself, then re-entered the cold stream of air ushering from the tunnel, crawled in just far enough to start scooping salt. He noted his hands shivering still.

“It’s from not eating,” Sam said.

“Stomach’s growling,” Doug said out loud as he backed out of the tunnel. “But I’m not hungry, much.”

“That’s not like you,” Sam said. “Maybe Datura is a hunger suppressant “

“I don’t feel high, not like yesterday,” Doug spoke out loud as he crawled back out of the tunnel.

“You could still be stoned,” Sam said. “After all, you’re talking to me,”

“I thought you were a ghost.”

“I said if it made it easier for you, I was a ghost.”

Doug made it to the water and began filling his canteen.

“But I was thinking you were trying to kill me.”

“Don’t trust your memories, I understand that, but you’ve got to trust yourself,” Sam said. “You’re arguing with yourself.”

Doug stared across the Bowl, then shifted his gaze to the All Seeing Eye.

“Profound truth always comes as a revelation,” Sam intoned, skipped a beat and added, “At least it’s a friendly argument, I mean, now.”

Doug nodded as he regained his seat on his slab.

The top of the rocks to the north suddenly lost the sun’s glow.

“I really wish you’d make a fire. I just think it would help. Drink water. By tomorrow morning you should finish the water. Maybe there’ll be enough time to find something to burn. When was the last time you peed? You’re good and dehydrated, Doug. Drink water.”

Doug paused and took inventory. His hands shook, his stomach growled, his head was light, although the headache was not nearly as blinding as it had been. He felt weak and tired, his internal organs ached in what he’d always called a water hangover, and he could easily have laid down and slept, but he knew he needed water in his system before anything. Doug re-opened the bladder, then took a coffee filter and placed it over the mouth, took one of the rubber bands in the plastic bag and gingerly wrapped it around the lip of the mouth. At first it didn’t cooperate, but then water sloshed up and wetted the filter. With that it formed to the mouth and the rubber band stayed where Doug wanted it. Now he raised the bladder bolo-style, and a stream of water dribbled through the filter. Doug’s hands shuddered with the weight, but the water made it into his mouth.

“No goiter for you,” Sam teased.

“Can I poison myself with too much iodine?” Doug asked.

“Yes,” Sam answered. “Let’s chance it.”

After four good mouthfuls the water barely trickled through the coffee filter. Doug pulled it off and felt vaguely pleased to see the fine silty mud making a perfect circle on the filter that hadn’t gotten into his stomach. The water still had something of a gritty greasy texture. He realigned the filter and took another four swallows. It was only then that he realized he was truly thirsty.

The psychological boost made him almost giddy. The horrors of yesterday and today faded away. He had conquered them, he had survived, outsmarted the ticks.

He wasn’t getting out of here by himself, that was clear now. He’d have to last another two days at least before they came looking. How much would he tell them when the Sheriff’s Search and Rescue showed? The BLM rangers would ream him a new one. He calculated he’d tell no one. Not yet. He needed to talk to Sam.

The septic odor was gone from the water, but there was a curiously familiar aftertaste that Doug only noticed now, after drinking ten mouthfuls. He set the water aside, his whole being feeling better, and got into his backpack.

More Carmex on the lips and corners of his eyes, his nostrils. His stomach rumbled, and there was a bit of a gnawing of hunger. He drank more water and contemplated the water-soaked-and-dried energy bar.

Mushroom, in oil. Doug licked his lips. The water had an after-taste like mushrooms and olive oil, Extra virgin. Damnedest thing. Where had he tasted that before?

Despite the sky being blue to the west, stars had begun to appear to the east.

Doug suddenly missed his children. He thought of his boy and two girls, not now as teenagers, but when they were little, and sweet. And not at the house, but in camp, at Bow Willow, or Coyote Canyon, or Boulder Wash, Burro Creek, somewhere near Dos Cabezas, Tony, eternally playing with his G.I. Joes, the girls and Mom laughing life girlfriends, measuring out the meager supply of water for hair washing. Camp, wherever it might be in whatever desert, that was Doug’s idea of home, where he truly fathered his children, where he truly loved his wife. He was nothing but a visitor to the desert, yet he never felt at peace, at rest, unless it was here and now.

Doug drank more water until the filter clogged again. Suddenly he rose, and he was amazed at how light he was, how refreshed, vital. He felt healed, physically and spiritually.

And he also realized it was time to leave this place. Yes, he had known it academically all along, from the first day, but now he began to understand it emotionally, spiritually.

He started hunting around for material to burn. A fire at least, at least for a while. Perhaps some brittle bush, maybe he could find cholla skeletons, but the more he hunted the stone corners, the more he knew he had to leave, not just for his survival, but on principle. His mind raced through a complex philosophical debate on the moral and ethical responsibility to not be here anymore, and the clarity of it made Doug pause. His mind had been clouded for the last two days, even before, he had to consider, but now, with but a few dollops of water in the right place at the right time, his mind, his very soul, soared. It had been muddled, to be sure, by the travails of the last two days, but all for naught. He now clearly saw the world in sharp clear perspective. Even the stone cathedral he stood in, the stars that the parapets and towers of rock rose into, were sharper in his eye.

The frustration lay in this bowl, this dark bowel he’d fallen into, with its vile game and otherwise beautiful setting. He ached, he yearned to be free of this sad little place. It simply was unworthy of him.

Doug had walked all the way around to the west side where the peyote grew. The moon suddenly appeared over the eastern ramparts. The stone and plants saturated with its dull blue light. Doug paused, and in his enlightened state, could hear the base creatures in the swamp clattering over each other, moving as close as they could to him.

Doug turned and faced south, dropped the paltry amount of kindling that he had found. He looked to the top of the wall that made up the southern stone, measured its height with new-found lucidity and started running toward it. There was lightness in his chest, a buoyancy that defied description. He called it up, willed it to gather strength. He found himself running on his toes, shoved off when it looked good and sailed effortlessly through the air.

And nearly didn’t make it. His boots hit the stone and he tumbled onto his side and bounced like a basketball to the next stone, hitting it with a dull thud. He almost bounded back into the bowl. He willed himself heavy and stopped immediately.

From his new perch on the southern end of the bowl, the All Seeing Eye appeared even more impressive, lit by the moon and stars. The tumble of stones looked completely different from here, rounder, with concave shadows that seemed to quiver in the wind.

And he was out of the bowl. He had freed himself, just like that.

There was wind here, hot, dry, coming in gusts. It made a hollow sucking sound through the stone castle he was imbedded in, an ancient sound, older than man, older than thought. It reminded Doug of waves crashing on the beach, rhythmic, peaceful, vaguely mathematical.

His water. Doug looked back across the bowl to where the stone slab altar was in shadows. He needed to finish that water.

Without thought, Doug bounced and floated effortlessly over the swamp and landed close to the slab, harder than he had expected, knocking the air out of himself. Once again he was in the Bowl, the All Seeing Eye looking down on him.

But there was the water bladder, with the juice of brilliance. He took off the cap and began to work the rubber band and filter back into place, but then decided it was too much trouble. What was a little sediment going to do to him?

Doug leaned back and let the fluid flow into his mouth. Some splashed out. He remonstrated himself for being sloppy.

But he must leave the bowl. Could he carry the water with him? And while he was at it, could he carry his backpack, his brine-filled canteen?

Let’s try it with the water first, Doug thought. He sealed the container and flopped it over his shoulder, then made a sprint toward the south wall again. This time, he slowed down as he approached the wall, kicked off gently, and concentrated more on the buoyancy in his chest. This time he landed gently on the boulder, skittering across it like a hang glider touching down.

The weight of the water bladder dragged him to the right, the shoulder he had it over. He brought it back around, pressed it to his chest and bounded up the next set of boulders, landing near the Cottonwoods.

Dark shadows lay underneath the rustling trees, and although he would have liked to have explored them, he felt a need to get back to camp, back to his gear and Jeep and the life he had.

The wind, dry, hot, came in gusts. Doug paused and calculated his route. He had to be careful with the wind. He’d head due west, to the caves Sam and he had looked down from for the water so long ago. From there he could just follow the trail. It was only these boulders that had held him back.

A sense of great relief swept over Doug. He looked back down at the bowl, and all he could see was the All Seeing Eye over the sparkling waters of the Liveless Pool.

Doug paused long enough to drink more water, took into consideration the wind factor, then started a careful leaping hike from boulder to boulder, pausing for a lull in the wind to come. At one point he stopped, felt around in his cargo pockets, and came up with the Carmex. He took the time to re-treat his lips, nostrils and the corner of his eyes. Then it was back to boulder hopping, rising up from the depths toward the caves.

When he reached them, the sense of relief, of freedom, swept over the desert rat. He fell to his knees in the small alcove and wept with joy.

Free, on so many planes, so many different ways, the mundane, and the sublime.

Doug drank more water, looked into the darkness of the cave, and decided to go over the top. He did not want to be in darkness.

He climbed up the sheer story-tall boulder, and thought of it like a climbing wall, with a tether attached to him that relieved him of the fear or strain of climbing. When he reached the top of the boulder, he paused and admired the panorama.

Behind him was the bowl, illuminated by moonlight and stars. Beyond, softened in the celestial radiance, the Yuha desert, Imperial Valley and the Colorado beyond, blissful in its silent shroud. Beyond that, the Chocolate Mountains, the next stubble on the horizon against the truly black sky. Before him lay the Un-named Valley, the Valley Above Valley of the Moon. He could see where his camp should be, but there were no lights or signs in the night to mark it.

He marveled at his own stupidity, humanity’s ignorance. It was time to leave the bowl, long past time. He had done what had to be done, willed it so. He sneered at the physical world that he had allowed to chain him to the earth for so long.

“All profound truths come as a revelation.”

Doug was in awe how profound that simple statement was. Free, his mind was free and open, stronger and yet more vulnerable as well. Doug lowered his eyes in humility.

A gust of wind hit him like a wall and he had to fall to all fours to keep from being blown off the stone. Doug waited for the gust to back off, then made a running leap that got him nearly to the old road before the wind came again.

Once more Doug went to all fours, the sand shifting underneath his hands and feet. He had to turn his head away to keep it from stinging his eyes. If it weren’t for the chin strap, his hat would have ended up back at the bowl.

The wind tapered off, and Doug stood up and ran down the old road. He reached the turn-off just as the next blast came. He made it down into the wash, and the wind whipped the Sumac and Desert Mahogany above him as he hid in his momentary shelter.

The sand storm abated again, and Doug seized the moment to make another running dash across a distance of flat stone between camp and the wash. Normally in such a wind he would have simply leaned into it and pushed on, but he didn’t trust his ability to make himself heavy at will, being new to it and all.

There was his Jeep, pointing at him where he’d backed it in to the camp spot. Past the Jeep, tucked up against the north facing stone, was his tent, his stove, the coolers underneath wool blankets.

Doug had half expected Sam to greet him, have a fire blazing, a beer opened, but upon reflection, he realized how impossible that would have been. Sam was probably at home sitting in front of the television watching re-runs of ‘Married With Children’. The other Sam had as much as told Doug that he was a figment of Doug’s imagination, to help him cope with the task at hand. Doug no longer needed such tricks of the mind to focus. He paused now and drank more of his brilliant water.

He sat down in one of the chairs and gloried in the comfort, the luxury. Doug’s next thought was to get a beer. He hopped up and walked over to the coolers, gingerly lifted the blanket. Sure enough, there was still ice in it. Not much, but the beer was still as cold as it could be. Colder than the Liveless Pool.

Doug hesitated before twisting the cap of the Sam Adam’s, grimaced, then put it back down in the cooler. He didn’t want a beer. He went for it, knee-jerk fashion. His mind raced and danced, processed a dozen different thoughts at once, but the one that took dominance was, did he need to drink something alcoholic? Doug held the water bladder up. He had discovered the liquor of brilliance, but he had also been denied booze for two days now. He looked around the camp with new eyes. He didn’t need the beer, he didn’t need the food. Without a camp fire he was looking out into the desert night instead of staring at hypnotic flame.

What if the feverish horrors from the day before had been nothing but Delirious Tremans, his body shaking off his physical dependence upon liquor, perhaps accelerated, brought on by the purification of the heat of the desert, sweating out the poisons he so enthusiastically consumed, and then the sudden falling from the boulder, the adrenalin rush, the cold, cold water. Freed of this addiction his mind had cleared and he was now brilliant, he could see so clearly now, through simple applied genius he could practically fly.

The wind had died down, the dusk gone and the night clear. Stars swirled overhead even with the glare of the moon moving through the sky. When was the last time he’d watched the moon move so quickly through the heaven?

There was nothing there in the camp he wanted, except maybe the chair, and Doug felt hollow at the loss of this chimera. He stood now, the urge to travel and explore upon him. Behind camp was a monolith of stone. Mixed in the rock were Pinyon Pine. He bounced out of his chair and with a comfortable stride worked up a path that grew steeper and more challenging, until he kicked off, as if at the bottom of a pool. His legs shoved against the stone and he floated toward the surface of the top, three stories high and overlooking the jeep trails and abandoned digs, Laurel Sumac and Blue Mountain Peak of his little valley.

Doug looked down into his camp, dark and gray, full of shadows and illusions. There was nothing for him there. He turned his attention away from the false infatuation.

The radio tower to the west was gone. He couldn’t see the microwave towers to the south. What had happened to them? With a furrowed brow he looked eastward. There was no glow of lights from El Centro.

There was another monolith of stone to the east, and with a running leap, Doug jumped to it, and then to the mountain of stacked stone next to that, always rising higher, gaining a better view. There were several gnarled Pine trees at the top of that mountain, and they rustled gently in the eternal breeze. Below Doug, to the east, was Moon Valley, Valle de Luna, weird-shaped stone and craggy outcroppings, monoliths and old camp sites full of the ghosts of memories and artifice.

Exhaustion suddenly overtook him. He thought of the cot he had set up in his tent. It would be too hot to get in the sleeping bag, he would lay on top. Why not stay here and nap a few hours? He’d load up, and decide then whether he was going back to the house, or home, wherever that might be. Then again, maybe not. Now that he was out of the bowl, there was plenty of time to decide.

Doug woke up screaming. He rolled off the stone slab and fell hard on the ground. His hands wrestled around blindly, searching for the brine-filled canteen.

It was mid-day, but he dared not open his eyes, they might squirt out of his head from all the pressure behind them. The pain was beyond anything he had ever encountered, all the hangovers of his life combined paled in comparison to this one.

And he was swathed in ticks.

They covered his head, his neck, under his T-shirt, in his crotch, along every protruding vein. Doug found the strap to the canteen and crawled on all fours to the boulder beach, out into the blistering sun.

Doug didn’t bother to take his clothes off. Kneeling before the All Seeing Eye, he shook the salted canteen, got it open after three attempts with numb fingers, then struggled to raise it above his head and pour it over him, all the while making grunting screams of anguish. He had soaked his head and shirt, arm pits and neck before he realized, clothed, this wasn’t going to work. He sat down and feverishly took his shoes off, whipped his pants and underwear off, flinging them into the lifeless pool. Now he worked the brine into the crevices of his crotch and ass cheeks, his legs, his feet. Finished, he paused for a moment, gasping.

“Wake up!” Sam bellowed. Doug struggled to his elbows.

“You can’t fall asleep in the sun, especially buck naked!”

He’d been unconscious. It couldn’t have been for long, his skin was not blistered, just a little pink. The salt had dried, the ticks were gone. Now his skin itched horribly, and once again he slid into the lifeless pool.

He jerked awake when the water got past his nostrils, and he came up gagging and spitting. He felt something slide from his finger, and he straightened up on his knees, then looked down through the clear water.

Something gold glistened from the bottom. Doug looked at his left hand. His wedding band was gone. He hadn’t been able to get that ring off in years, and now it slid right off.

Doug reached down and retrieved his ring, and suddenly saw an image staring up from the surface of the water, one he did not recognize. He stared for a long time at his reflection, eyes sunken into his head, hair matted flat against it. His chubby cheeks were gone.

“Doug!” Sam called sharply. The naked skeleton in the water jerked his attention to the memory on the stone beach. Sam motioned as he crouched on his haunches. “Chuck your clothes up here.”

Doug processed the command, then looked around him, spotted pieces of clothing and threw them up on the beach until Sam spoke again.

“Okay, now get out of the water. Nonono, not this way. Remember? You slipped, and scraped up your knee. Go up the other way. That’s it. Now, go lie down on the slab for awhile. Easier said than done, huh? Hey, grab your lip balm, its in one of the cargo pockets in your pants.”

Naked, Doug crawled gingerly toward the slab. His backpack was there, and his heart soared when he saw the water bladder. It wasn’t empty. He was so thirsty.

And then he realized he couldn’t drink it.

The one essential for desert survival is water, and he didn’t have any.

Doug began wheezing as he crawled up on the slab, which turned to sobbing as he lowered his head down.

“Doug! Wake up!”

The skeleton with skin stirred and looked up to see Sam.

“There’s chores to be done, Doug, and we’ve only got a couple of hours before sunset.” Sam pointed to the cave. “We need to set up a perimeter of salt around the slab, the wider the better. Put your lip balm on while I talk, Doug, that’s just one problem we don’t need right now, cracked lips. Then you’ll need to get dressed.”

“Water,” he croaked. Sam smiled and winked.

“Right you are. First batch of water came from the Datura Punchbowl, couldn’t help that, never even imagined the water up here was spiked.”

Doug moved mechanically as Sam spoke, wiping Carmex on his lips, nostrils, the corners of his eyes.

“How’s it spiked? Think about it. There’s some kind of fungus or lichen growing in this soil, and it either makes or is the psychotropic drug you ingested yesterday. It’s all steeped in the water, and the water here is a tea of this stuff. Where you made your mistake is,” Sam pointed down to the north end of the swamp. “You got your water from just this side of the Datura plants. The water’s been soaking in the source of the drug the longest right there What we gotta do is get the water,” Sam pointed to the south end of the swamp, to where the water drizzled into the bowl, “from that end, where the water hasn’t had a chance to soak in the mushroom dirt, or whatever. What do you want to do first?”

Doug looked down on his naked self, then back up at Sam.

“Clothes,” he croaked.

Doug did not remember getting to the stone beach. Dry and hot, his clothes felt like they’d been washed in a fabric softener.

He wrestled with his socks to exhaustion, then his underwear, his pants, shirt, boots. He gasped for air. Every joint in his body ached beyond anything he’d felt before. He felt feverish, but there was nothing to sweat.

“Doug, we’re running out of time.”

Doug nodded, rolled over and started toward the slab altar.

“We have to empty the water bladder, fill it with some water and wash it out.”

Doug closed his burning eyes and shook his head, then opened them again, and crawled back to the slab.

He could not carry the bladder. It was too heavy. He began to drag it.

“First we have to empty it so that the ticks won’t follow it up to where we are, and we want to attract the ticks down to the north end, away from the cave entrance. So go down to the ledge above the stone beach.”

Back where he’d just dragged himself from. Doug grunted as he jerked the bladder along with him. At the edge he propped the bladder so its mouth hung over. He tried to pull off the cap. He struggled until his hand slipped and he tumbled off the edge onto the stone beach.

He lay there panting for several minutes, finally struggling onto one side. He gritted his teeth as he studied the cap, his fingers, then bore into the task, grunting and cursing, until finally the cap popped off. The water poured over the stone beach and Doug. When it was light enough, Doug hoisted the bladder up and the content drained out.

“It’s full of sediment,” Sam said. “Get some of this punchbowl water in there and wash it out, then we’ll be ready.”

Doug nodded again, reached over, stuck the bladder in the velvet water, and sloppily washed out the sediment.

“We gotta get going here, Doug, we still have t’get the salt after the water. Time’s a’wastin’.”

Doug struggled for focus. He scooped up the cap and stuck it in one of his cargo pockets, then rose and staggered drunkenly to the wall.

He focused on the swamp, the Datura plants a foot away from him.

The ticks gathered. It seemed to take a long while, and even then there didn’t seem to be nearly as many as there had been before.

“You have to hurry,” Sam said. “The sooner you get to the south end, the more time you’ll have to get water. It’s going to be much more shallow, the rock’ll be inches below the surface.”
“Slide the hat into the crap,” Doug whispered.

“Ready? Go!”

Doug rose and started his drunken dash. By the time he’d gotten to the cave entrance his wheeze was a whistling protest of exhaustion. Falling to his knees on the stone, he did just as he’d planned, slid the hat into the slime. Like the rest of his clothing, it too was bone dry, and it seemed to take forever for it to saturate with the grim, black septic-smelling water. Doug looked up. There was as yet no sign of the ticks, but he thought he heard a distant rattle, like small hard sticks being cracked against each other. He looked down. Water pooled in his hat.

Doug worked the bladder around, his fingers feeling numb and inept. He managed to get a flow of the vile liquid into the bladder. He looked up again. Yes, they were coming. They weren’t in near as big a hurry as they’d been the day before, but the reeds bent under their accumulated weight, shivered with their glancing blows as they passed.

The water had stopped flowing, there was nowhere for the water to flow to, the bladder just not deep enough. The ticks were still only three quarters of the way to him when he jerked the bladder and hat out of the water, and staggered now down to where the peyote was.

There was less than half a quart of water in the bag. Doug sloshed it around, dying for a taste. After a moment, he dumped it out onto the cactus plants.

Collapsing to the rock, Doug propped himself up against the stones built up like a container garden.

“Come on, Doug, there’s chores to be done, dreams to be dreamt, visions to be seen, without the assistance of hallucinogenics.”

“I have to rest.”

“Chores, Doug. Have to do the camp chores.”

Doug closed his eyes, forced them open again.

“Sam? What if all these chores, all this talk, all this conjecture, is just to keep us occupied. Y’know, busy, while we wait to die.”

Sam sat down on the rock wall above Doug, his light day pack on his back, knobby knees sticking out.

“That could be said about life. We’re born, we struggle, we die.”

Doug could feel his resolve sliding away, dissolving. He tried to fight it, but it used so much energy.

“Let’s get some water to drink, Doug,” Sam said. “We’ll need to get the iodine tablets from your pack. Make some potable water, then you’ll feel better.”

Doug shook his head.

“In a while.”

“No,” Sam countered. “There isn’t going to be ‘in a while’. Its now, Doug, before the sun sets.”

“I don’t have the strength.”

“Kid, you’ve got to put up a salt barrier, you’ve got to make up another canteen full of brine water if they get through.”

Doug coughed a laugh bordering on hysteria.

“Son, this is it,” Sam said forcefully. “What you do right now determines whether you live or die. You’ve got to suck it up and find the strength to do what you have to do to live. You won’t survive another night with the ticks. They’re draining your blood away. There’s no other way, but salt.”

Doug paused, then turned bleary eyes to the entrance to the salted cave. Sam followed Doug’s gaze, then snapped back.

“If you go in there, we’ll never find you.”

“They won’t go in there,” Doug said. “The salt on the ground.”

“The lack of oxygen, or a poison gas. For God’s sake man, think of your family.”

Doug looked up at the old man, muddled through his fading memory.

“I have a family?”

Sam seemed to study the emaciated desert rat for a moment.

“Amnesia. I’m sure it’s an unintended act of kindness.” Sam slid off the wall and drew closer “Come on, kid. I need you. You promised to scatter my ashes with a cannon.”

“Thought we’d agreed on a shotgun.”

“Well—y’know, do what you can, but the point is, until I die, it’s all about me.”

Doug coughed another laugh, lolled his head forward and closed his eyes.

“See, that’s the difference between you’n me, Sam. I don’t care what you do with my carcass. Make rattles with my bones, use me as a doorstop until I’m too ripe.”

Doug raised his head, and Sam was still there, looking concerned, his bushy white eye-brows furrowed.

“When I die,” Doug started with a twisted grin, “I want to be a desert ghost.” He nodded and grinned some more. “I’ve got my haunting route all worked out. I’d start at Rock House Canyon, right there where the line cabin is, go across to Carrizo Gorge and float up the railroad line, through the tunnels, across the trestles, to Dubber Spur, then shoot east to the Desert View Tower, south to Blue Angels Peak, run the border down to Pinyon Wash, edge north along the Mountains in Davies Valley, across the freeway, through Devil’s Canyon, back down to the road that runs from Dos Cabezas, Motrero Wash, back across the track to S-2, down Canyon Sin Nombre to that crude pioneer cemetery at the Grave’s Ranch, and back up Carrizo Wash to Rock House Canyon.” Doug’s hands had been traveling the route in the air in front of him as he looked into the old man’s eyes. “I’ll spend eternity climbing every boulder, exploring every cave, every water hole, every plant inside my domain, every old dig or sign that man had been, strived, lost, then disappeared. I’ll touch every stone, smell every cactus blossom, know them in every season, know the Washingtonia in the rain and cold, feel the sand in the heat of Summer. I’ll sit on the monuments in Moon Valley and watch the stars, stand at Mountain Springs and wait for the sunrise, Stand on Table Mountain and watch it set. I won’t know the cactus’s genus any more than I know them now, but I’ll know It, and I’ll smell the creosote after a good rain, find shade in the Shaman’s Cave or one of the dugouts at China Camp. I’ll do this until nothing living remembers my name, until I am truly forgotten.”

Sam didn’t flinch. He listened expressionless. Doug shifted fractionally, hinting at compromise as he continued.

“I might sit in at a campfire some times, listen to the dreams of the living, know what sweet sad fantasies they are, but I hope I don’t make a habit of it. The gnawing loneliness will be my well-earned Purgatory. The perfect peace of solitude, my redemption, my paradise.” Doug looked away in thought, returned his attention to the old man. “Heaven.”

The two men sat in silence for a long time. Sam coughed.

“You do know, Doug, I never did that thing to you, that nightmare.”

Doug nodded as he looked blankly at the ground.

“I know.”

“Never hurt anyone in my life, ‘cept in ‘Nam. It was in your mind. All a hallucination.”

Doug hadn’t stopped nodding and now he whispered.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then come with me now.” The memory leaned closer to the skeleton. “Let’s get back to camp and get some water and food. Let’s drink ourselves sober, and tell tall tales. Come with me. Now.”

Doug had lowered his head into his hands. He did not answer.

Now, Doug, now. Let’s go.”

Still Doug didn’t answer. It was a long time before Sam spoke again.

“I’m going back to camp now, Doug.” Sam rose, paused, as if waiting for Doug to answer. “Am I going to see you back at camp?”

Doug rocked gently.

“Camp, Doug. Camp? Let’s go back to camp. You know where camp is?”

The silence dragged on.

“Do you know what ‘camp’ is?”

Sam’s tone had shifted to irritation, disgust.

A moment later, Doug sensed Sam leaving. He looked up and saw the old man floating up, west, clearing the boulders by maybe a foot, towards the caves of three days past. His boots dangled, his legs were stiff, his arms down to his sides, as if he was being flown out by a cable. Really a graceless flight, no elegance to it at all. Sam never looked back, and Doug did not watch the whole time. He did not look again either, but collapsed to the stone ground in an ungainly heap.

Less than an hour later Doug woke up with a jerk and vomited. The coiled snake in his gut twisted, and Doug was ripping his pants off, and in one corner of the planter container he squatted and screamed and wept as he crapped and vomited all at once. It went on in bouts for an hour, until what was coming out his ass was the same white viscous liquid that dribbled from his sobbing lips. Finally, when there was nothing left in him, the snake eased up, and Doug laid down again on the rock.

The night came, and so did the ticks. Not nearly as many as before, they weren’t as enthusiastic either. The driven of the species had already glutted themselves, three times over, paired off and set about reproducing, the bred males being eaten by the females to supply them even more nourishment for the unborn progeny. The ticks now taking up their position behind ears, in warm places, were the males that, for whatever reason, hadn’t bred. Their gene lines were doomed to extinction, their only reason to seek a warm-blooded host was to maintain their own meaningless short lives. The females would lay their eggs in the cold swamp and the next generation would lay dormant until the presence of a warm-blooded host was sensed, which could be decades. Then they would hatch and hunt for the source of their survival stirring. The doomed male ticks had no such driving force behind them, just going through the motions like the borderline robots that they were. They did suck harder on a low blood pressure host. They didn’t mind wasting the energy. They did not sate themselves and leave either. They had no place to go. They also dumped more of the enzyme they used to thin the blood, to keep it from clotting, which acted as an endorphin on the host. They did not leave when the host suffered a stroke in